Larry the BSD Guy, also known as the Free Software Guy, is hanging up the jersey to pursue another of his own writing interests. Read his final column from Fossforce, this one featuring LinuxFest NorthWest, an annual open-source trade show held in Bellingham, Washington. Thank you for your contributions to the free and open source community, and we wish you the best in future endeavors.

Larry the BSD Guy

It’s a sad day at the FOSS Force office. Larry Cafiero says goodbye and walks off into the sunset.

This weekend, the Grand Old Man (or Woman — take your pick) of Linux expos in North America takes place in the upper left corner of the United States.

For over a decade and a half, LinuxFest Northwest has flown the flag literally in Microsoft’s backyard, an annual open source event held the last weekend in April in Bellingham, Wash. LFNW features presentations and exhibits on various free and open source topics, as well as Linux distributions and applications. It usually has something for everyone from the novice to the professional.

It has a special place in my heart as well. While I think that SCALE is the best show on the continent for obvious reasons (the SCALE Publicity Team is solely responsible, he says in jest), LFNW is my favorite show to attend, not only because of the history but because of the community vibe the show gives off at an expo that has refused to give in to the creeping corporatism to which other shows have succumbed ….

In this BSD Now episode, hosts Allan Jude and Kris Moore interview Benedict Reushling (of the FreeBSD Foundation) about his humble beginnings and the story behind joining organization. Hit play below to tune in:

User Remy van Elst shows us how to get OpenStack setup with bsd-cloudinit on FreeBSD 10.3. OpenStack is a an open-source cloud managing software used to control large pools of compute, storage, and networking resources via the OpenStack API. See the link below for the full instructions.

We are going to prepare a FreeBSD image for Openstack deployment. We do this by creating a FreeBSD 10.3-RELEASE instance, installing it and converting it using bsd-cloudinit. We’ll use the CloudVPS public Openstack cloud for this. Create an account there and install the Openstack command line tools, like nova, cinder and glance.

Michael W Lucas, critically acclaimed author of many BSD books, introduces the long awaited FreeBSD Mastery: Advanced ZFS co-written by Allan Jude. This book is the follow-up to FreeBSD Mastery: ZFS, which released last year.

ZFS improves everything about systems administration. Once you peek under the hood, though, ZFS’ bewildering array of knobs and tunables can overwhelm anyone. ZFS experts can make their servers zing—and now you can, too, with FreeBSD Mastery: Advanced ZFS.

Michael Larabel of Phoronix recently ran some benchmark tests, comparing FreeBSD & PC-BSD 10.3 with Linux. He tests everything from database benchmarks to the compiler. See the detailed results in the link below.

The organizers of this year’s EuroBSDcon are requesting a call for papers for all presenters. The conference will be held on 22-25 September 2016, in Belgrade, Serbia. Head on over to their website to submit your proposal!

EuroBSDcon 2016: Belgrade, Serbian Republic

EuroBSDcon is the European technical conference for users and developers of BSD-based systems. The conference will take place in Belgrade, Serbia. Tutorials will be held on Thursday and Friday in the main conference hotel, while the shorter talks and papers program is on Saturday and Sunday in ….

The call for Talk and Presentation proposals period will close on Sunday the 8th of May, 2016

This tutorial by user tanb shows us how to get a FreeBSD virtual machine setup on xhyve. xhyve, a port of bhyve, is a virtualization platform for Mac OS X operating system. See the link below for the full instructions.

Create Guest Image …

This tutorial by user sdebnath shows us how to get VLAN set up in a FreeBSD jail. See the link below for the full instructions.

This article discusses how to set up jails on a FreeBSD 11-CURRENT system utilizing VIMAGE (aka VNET) to provide a virtualized independent network stack for each jail with support for VLAN tagging.

Prerequisites

You have a machine installed with FreeBSD 11-CURRENT on ZFS.

We will be building world and kernel and using that as the base for the jails. Hence basic knowledge of FreeBSD system administration is assumed. If you’ve never compiled and installed a FreeBSD base system and kernel, this article may be hard to follow. Refer to the FreeBSD Handbook, especially chapter 8: ‘Configuring the FreeBSD Kernel’ and chapter 23: ‘Updating and Upgrading FreeBSD’.